Load balancing distributes workload across multiple physical or virtual machines. In a virtualized datacenter environment, a load balancer may be implemented by a virtual machine running on one of multiple host devices. For example, one virtual machine may provide load balancing for a tenant within the datacenter. As each packet is received, the virtual load balancer selects one of multiple physical or virtual machines to perform a service on the packet. If, for example, the packet is a request for a web server, the virtual load balancer uses a load balancing algorithm to select one of the multiple physical or virtual machines implementing the web server. The packet, however, traverses a path from a switch or router, through a virtualization software layer within a host device, to the virtual load balancer, and, upon selection of a web server, back to the virtualization software layer and on to the web server, which may be within the same host device or external to the host device. Additionally, some load balancing solutions will route responses from the web server back through the virtual load balancer before the response is forwarded to the device that transmitted the original request for the web server. All requests, and possibly some or all responses, therefore pass through the virtual load balancer. The virtual load balancer, therefore, is a choke point for network throughput.